Product description

Until the mid-1800s, no-one really knew what a dinosaur was - let alone what one looked like. So when Victorian artist Waterhouse Hawkins built the first life-size models he dazzled the world with his awe-inspiring creations. For ages 6+.

Author information

Barbara Kerley's award-winning biographies--including WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALICE? and THE EXTRAORDINARY MARK TWAIN (ACCORDING TO SUSY), both illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham, and THE DINOSAURS OF WATERHOUSE HAWKINS and WALT WHITMAN: WORDS FOR AMERICA, both illustrated by Brian Selznick--are consistently praised for their lively prose, meticulous research, and artistic presentation style. Kerley lives in Portland, Oregon. You can visit her online at www.barbarakerley.com. In addition to The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick is the illustrator of the Caldecott Honor winner, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and The New York Times Best Illustrated Walt Whitman: Words for America, both by Barbara Kerley, as well as the Sibert Honor Winner When Marian Sang, by Pam Munoz Ryan, and numerous other celebrated picture books and novels. Brian has also worked as a set designer and a puppeteer. When he isn't traveling to promote his work all over the world, he lives in San Diego, California, and Brooklyn, New York.

Review quote

Who could resist? Staring straight out from the handsome album-like cover is a slight man with a shock of white hair and an intense, intelligent gaze. Over his shoulder looms the enormous mouth of a dinosaur. This is perfectly designed to pique reader's curiosity with one of the strangest true stories dinsoaur lovers will ever read. The man is Waterhouse Hawkins, who, in Victorian England, devoted his life to making ordinary people aware of dinosaurs at a time when most had never heard of them and could not imagine what they looked like. Hawkins, an established author/illustrator of books on animal anatomy, estimated the scale of the dinosaurs from their bones, made clay models, erected iron skeletons with brick foundations and covered them over with cement casts to create dramatic public displays. Such was Hawkin's devotion to his work that he engaged the Queen's patronage, catered to the fathers of paleontology at a dinner party inside an iguanadon model, and was invited to bring his dinosaur models to Central Park. It was in New York that Hawkins's story turned grimly sad. Antagonizing Boss Tweed with some ill-chosen words, Hawkins thereafter found his dinosaurs smashed and buried beneath Central Park, where they remain today. The fascinating story, well documented in authoritative, readable author and illustrator notes, is supported by creative decisions in illustration, bookmaking, and design. Hawkins was a showman, and Selznick presents his story pictorially as high melodrama, twice placing the hero front stage, before a curtain revealing a glimpse of the amazing dinosaurs. turns of the page open onto electrifying, wordless, doble-page spreads. A boy who appears at the book's beginning and end (where he sits on a park bench in Central Park while fragment of the dinosaurs lie among the tree roots below) affects a touching circularity. Stunning.---Kirkus Reviews, July 1st 2001 starred review What a marvelous pairing: the life of the nineteenth-century